The Road Away From Here
by damalur
Summary: Sam goes to hell. Cas goes to heaven. Dean gets drunk, plays at domesticity, fails to sleep with Lisa, and continues to be far too involved with his car. Dean/Cas.


When Dean shows up on Lisa's doorstep, she pulls him into a hug, feeds him a sandwich, puts Ben to bed, and herds Dean out to the front porch. They sit on the steps and make short work of a six-pack; when Dean's numbness starts to feel more chemical than grief-driven, Lisa says, "Dean, what is it you need here?"

Dean looks away from his hands for the first time in twenty minutes. "You know you're always welcome here, and Ben adores you," she says, and twists the tab off her can. "But I'm not about to let you just waltz in and play daddy, and you know I have—I think I told you, like, twelve times over the phone that I'm seeing someone."

"Uh, yeah," Dean says. "You might've mentioned it once or twice."

"Something like that," she agrees. "So why...?"

Dean can't help that his breath hitches. Feels like he can't help a lot of things these days. _I promised Sammy_, he doesn't say. What escapes is, instead: "I want out."

"Out of what?"

"Everything," Dean says. "Hunting. This life. I want out, and you are...you're all I've got on the outside. Damn near all I've got period. Thought maybe you could help figure out how to go about the whole normal thing." His jaw nearly cracks, he shuts it so quickly. His word quota's used up for the day.

Lisa's hand settles between his shoulderblades and she starts to rub his back, like he saw her do once with Ben.

"Guest room's yours for as long as you want it," she says.

* * *

He salts the doors before he goes to bed. It's habit.

* * *

Dean spends the better part of the next four days sleeping. On the fifth day, Lisa calls in to the studio and cancels all her classes. When she stands at the foot of his bed, he jerks awake but doesn't automatically whip out the knife—over the past two years, he's gotten pretty used to a harmless-yet-creepy presence hovering over him while he sleeps. Makes him kinda nostalgic.

"C'mon." She tugs at the sheets. "Up and at 'em."

Dean puts a pillow over his head.

Lisa—sweet, flexible Lisa—dumps a cup of ice on his ass.

"Jesus fuck!" Dean yelps, and scrambles out of bed like she lit a fire under him.

"Sorry," she says, sounding anything but. "I had to get you up somehow."

"Yeah? Why is—" He twists around to rub at his rear end. "Why is that?"

She shrugs and grins. "You wanted normal. Normal people don't sleep all day. They don't live off credit-car fraud, either," she adds, which is how Dean find himself going through the classifieds for a job over breakfast.

Lisa cracks open an egg at the same time Dean cracks open a newspaper. He has to remind himself to flick past the obits.

"So," she says, "jobs. What are you good at, anyway?"

It startles him to remember that two weekends together and a couple dozen phone conversations don't mean she actually knows him. He feels easy with her, in a way he rarely does with other people.

"Cars," he says, even though he should be making a cheap come-on. "I used to work at garages before we hit the road full-time." _Bought Sammy three bikes that way,_ he almost adds, one after the other when they'd had to leave a town too quickly.

"Oh yeah?" she asks. "I should have guessed from that beast you've got out front."

_She's a classic,_ he wants to insist, but the words stick in his throat. Lisa grins over her shoulder at him as she fries her egg; she's gorgeous, and it should—he wishes it did—feel like a revelation to realize that he doesn't want her, not at all.

* * *

When Lisa switches on the newest episode of _Dr. Sexy, M.D._, Dean goes automatically for the trunk. He lays his spread out on the coffee table and starts to put an edge on one of Sammy's old switchblades. Lisa puts the TV on mute.

"Dean?" she says.

"Yeah? Do you mind turning that back on? I want to know what happens when Johnny Drake—"

"Dean. I'm not trying to criticize, but 'normal' also includes not having an entire arsenal in my living room."

Oh.

"Especially not around my ten-year-old son."

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

On the next commercial, he hauls everything back out to the Impala. Tucks Sam's knife in his pocket, though. He couldn't say why.

* * *

Lisa seems surprised to find out he can cook. He doesn't think about it, just stops at the grocery store on the way home from the garage. Lisa's having her boyfriend over for dinner tonight—it's a new guy, a different guy than the one she was dating when Dean turned up at her door, and it's the first time she's had him over. By the time Lisa gets home from picking Ben up from camp, Dean has three pots boiling on the stove while he dices tomatoes for the salad.

"Dean, you're cooking."

"Yeah," he says.

"Why are you cooking?"

"Because you suck at it?" he offers. It's true. She gets by, as best she can since she's got a growing kid, but he's had her meatloaf, and it was all he could do to not exorcise the thing. He hears Ben screaming and sets down the knife; the kid slams into his leg, clutches for three seconds, and takes off full-tilt again. If nothing's fractured, Dean's willing to count it as a hug.

"How do you know how to cook?" she asks. He snags the cans of olives off the counter a split second before she plops her purse in the spot he vacated.

"Used to cook for..."

"For Sam," she finishes. He shrugs, drops the tomatoes in the bowl, reaches for the next ingredient. Fuckin' onions. They always make his eyes water.

That evening, Lisa introduces him to Peter as her roommate. It makes him grin honestly for the first time in forever.

* * *

He pops the hood on the Impala one scorching weekend in July, spends twenty minutes pointing out engine parts to Ben before the kid gets bored and wanders off. He's back soon enough, pestering Dean with questions while Dean checks the tire pressure.

"What's that?" the kid asks.

"Lug nut," Dean says.

The kids opens a door and crawls inside. "What's this?"

Dean cranes his neck up. "Gear shift," he says.

"And what're those?"

Dean doesn't want to look and doesn't know how to answer. "Graffiti," he finally settles on, and breathes easier when Ben doesn't ask what the initials stand for. Maybe he figured it out himself.

The kid digs through the collection of maps and motel coupons that live on the floor, then pops the trunk and practically climbs inside. "What's this?"

"Twelve-gauge," Dean says. "Pump action."

"And this?"

Dean shades his eyes. "Bowie knife."

"Huh." Ben disappears, digs around some more. "And this?" He's holding up an old .38 revolver that Dad used to strap to his ankle. Even though he's holding it safely—fingers off the trigger, barrel pointed away from both himself and Dean—Lisa's no-weapon rule dawns on Dean.

"Hey, Ben? Why don't you close the trunk for now?"

"Why?" Ben wants to know.

Dean wipes his hands on a rag and hoists the kid out. "Because your mom will have my hide, that's why," he says. "And 'cause if you stay out of the trunk, I'll take you out to the reservoir this weekend and teach you how to blow up plastic soldiers with firecrackers."

"Sweet!" Ben yells, right in his ear. Dean doesn't even wince.

* * *

He and Lisa get in the habit of sitting on the front steps most evening after dinner, drinking beer and watching Ben catch fireflies in a jar. She's into high-end microbrews, and Dean teases her about being a tree-hugging hippie.

"I am not!" she protests. "Just because I don't like horse urine—"

"Sorry," he says. "I don't listen to people who drive hybrids and teach yoga."

She slams her fist into his shoulder companionably. "Hush. I get enough of that from Peter—I had to explain to him _three times_ that I eat meat. God, all that work for a hamburger."

Dean smirks and takes another slug off his beer. They watch Ben run around with one of the neighbor kids for a couple of minutes; neighbor kid's jar is nearly solid with bugs.

"So, uh," Lisa says, "you know you can bring girls home, right? I mean—I feel like I'm living with my gay best friend."

Dean chokes on his beer. What the hell is he supposed to say to that? He's never let the words out, never said _I like dick, too_ and let it hang in the air; it was always something he kept quiet from Dad, and there wasn't—until Cas there wasn't—

He hacks until Lisa slaps him on the back, and then has to chug more beer to regain his equilibrium. "I kind of have someone. Had someone," he finally settles on.

"What happened?"

Hell with it. "He went back to heaven," Dean says.

"Oh. Wow." Lisa sets down her bottle and leans back on her hands. "Wow. You mean that literally, don't you—heaven?"

"Yeah," Dean says. "Angel of the Lord. He dragged me out of hell. Couldn't work a cell phone for anything, though."

"Huh. Were the wings hot?"

Dean turns to stare and catches her grinning slyly. "Nah, but the tail was," he says.

"Get out of here, angels don't have tails!"

"How would you know? Ever fucked an angel?"

Lisa rolls her eyes and, instead of answering him, says, "You still stare at my chest."

"Just because the angel had a dick doesn't mean I'm dead," Dean retorts.

* * *

He has dreams. Not the nightmares he had at first, the endless loop of Sam falling, but strange, disquieting dreams that leave him awake and sweating in the gray hours before dawn. Sometimes he pads downstairs, sometimes out the door, to stand in his bare feet and stare at the Impala or the road.

Lisa catches on to his insomnia and starts leaving books on his nightstand, usually whatever she has home from the library that week. He reads a lot of Stephen King that way, and lots of chick-lit, and once even _Slaughterhouse Five_ when she's binging on classics. Around the time Ben starts back at school she gets on a Steinbeck kick, _East of Eden_ and _Cannery Row_ and _The Pearl_ all in short order. One night he clicks on the bedside lamp to find _Travels with Charley_ waiting for him. He makes it as far as the first page—_When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet_—before he has to snap the book shut. The next day he spends three hours teaching Ben to count cards and avoids looking at the Impala like she's poison. He has a promise to keep.

* * *

Lisa gets him drunk one night, the sole time he's been drunk since the first night on her front steps. Ben is staying over at a friend's; it's late, the streetlamps casting distant pools of light on the empty asphalt, and Lisa keeps topping off his wine glass without asking if he wants a refill. He'd find it presumptuous—aw, who is he shitting, he loves it. Hasn't ever been drunk off of wine before, though, in all the many, many, many times he's been shitfaced.

"Plastic crap," he tells her, gesturing expansively. The wine sloshes onto his fingers. "Plastic crap _everywhere_, man, how do you deal? Sammy never had that many toys, and Jesus Christ, it all looks the same."

"Uh-huh," Lisa says. "You know, for such a smooth S.O.B., you actually say disturbingly little." She's got a way of leaning on her words that reminds him of Bobby.

"Yeah?" Dean squints at her, can't make out much in the dark. "What's the deal with turning me into a wino?"

She lifts a shoulder. Dean wonders without any heat if she can still twist herself into a pretzel. "You said maybe six words on what happened to you. It seemed like you might need to talk."

"So you got me drunk to get me to spill my guts? You low-down bitch," he says admiringly.

"Cheers," she says, and toasts him with the bottle. "Did it work?"

He's afraid the answer is yes. "Yes."

"Gonna tell me what happened to you and your brother?"

He thinks about that. Considers telling her about the pit, the fall, Sam swallowed up by the earth. About Adam. About the Seals. About Cas. About hell, his father, the Colt, Jo and Ellen, prophets and demons and the stupid Lego blocks still crammed in the Impala's vents, about the best pie he's ever had and how Sam always had a hard-on for Oklahoma, about the way Cas's eyes seared into him and the nights they didn't spend together, about the four loneliest years of his life and the day he found his brother again.

In the end, there's only one story he'll ever tell. It starts like this: "When I was four, my mom died in a fire."

Only story he'll ever tell.

* * *

By the time the leaves start to turn he's reading the obits obsessively again, like a nervous tic even awareness can't cure. He swears up and down to Lisa that he's only leaving for the weekend, that he just wants to make sure his baby can still handle the distance. He means to stop in Illinois. Then Missouri. Then Arkansas. Doesn't. Keeps going until he hits desert, until his bones bake, until he can open up the engine and the cities aren't packed shoulder-to-shoulder. As he blows through Roswell, New Mexico, he sticks Pink Floyd in the tape deck. Let the aliens suck on _that_

* * *

The spaces in this part of the country are insane, the landscape drawn on a scale so large that distance starts to feel meaningless. He rambles the back roads for a couple of days, picking up the feel of things, letting the rhythm settle back over him. At a tourist trap outside of Truth or Consequences, he buys Ben six silver dollars and an emu feather. Ben makes him think of Lisa, and Lisa of Indiana and the neat house that should feel more like home than some dusty state highway in the armpit of the country.

It takes everything in him to turn around. He has a promise. He's not the one who doesn't come back.

* * *

Dean's surprised to see Lisa's Toyota in the driveway when he pulls up. She should be off teaching pregnant ladies how to meditate or walk on coals or some shit like that. He's willing to concede that he might be delirious; sixteen straight hours on the road and too much QT coffee can do that to a man.

Then he decides he must've passed delirious three states backs, because when he swings open the front door, Cas is waiting for him.

"You're wearing my shirt," Dean says stupidly.

Cas looks down at his chest, like he needs confirmation. "I am," he says.

Dean isn't aware that he's staring at Cas—or that he's losing time—until Lisa breaks in with, "I couldn't just let him take off after you without any clothes. You're welcome."

"You were naked?" Dean says.

"Raphael neglected to mention that this form wouldn't arrived clothed. Jimmy came with pants," he says, and he sounds vaguely apologetic. Maybe Dean's projecting. He used to do that, with Cas, read layers of meaning when the only meaning that existed was ineffable.

"On that note, I need to get to work," Lisa says. She slings her purse over her shoulder and gently pries Dean's fingers from the doorknob. She also catches him in a hug, arms tight around his waist rather than his neck. "Don't be a stranger, okay?" she whispers.

"Okay," Dean says. She squeezes him one last time and makes her exit, the best—still the best woman he knows. And the whole time he doesn't once take his eyes off Cas.

"Dean. I'm human now," Cas says once she's left.

"Oh, yeah? That a good thing?"

Cas cocks his head. "Is it?"

"Yeah," Dean decides. "Yeah, it is." He doesn't say, _You came back_, but he thinks maybe Cas hears him anyway. Cas is good like that.

They study each other for a couple hundred heartbeats. Dean figures they're allowed.

"Probably 'bout time for someone to save Sam's sorry ass," he says at length. His keys are still in his hand, he can feel his Colt 1911 snug against the small of his back. Cas is here.

"Dean Winchester," Castiel says, voice tinted with amusement. "Are you saying you need _help_?"


End file.
